You hear phrases like 'don't worry about what the competition is doing, focus on what you're doing' thrown around a lot in competitive sports. By in large it's very accurate, taking time to concern yourself with the minimal context snap shot of people's training you see on Instagram is generally a waste of time. But people still do it. So, I'm going to try and provide some use for your MCMs and your WCWs, some inspos for your fitspos. Sorry, I got nothing for fithoes.If you're a competitive athlete, for the context of this nonsense let's assume you’re a powerlifter. Which pretty much negates the competitive athlete definition.

Photo Credit: Dave Hoff

Salt aside, doing a needs analysis of your competition lifts and comp day preparation in general is a useful tool. Even if it's just an objective post comp chat about the whole affair with your coach, once all the happy comp day elation has died down. You can sit and talk through what you thought went well, what didn't, why you think that is? It can really help future planning to avoid the same issues arising at future competitions and can go a long way in training structure.

​Let's get some hypothetical situations on the go, then we'll circle back to the Instagram carrot I dangled earlier. You're a -72Kg class female lifter, in the senior age class, competing at national level, and you placed 3rd. You hit new personal best lifts at the meet, but the distance between you and the top 2 (and let's assume that means almost certain selection for internationals) is reasonable, and it's disheartening. How can you gauge progress against your betters objectively, what gives them a higher total than you?Here is where your true insta-stalker self can go hog wild. Essentially, you're looking for as much comparable information as possible. How long have they been lifting? What was their background before lifting? How strong were they when they started? How long have they had a coach?A lot of these could provide instant rationales as to why they might be better than you. In a sport where gains are almost comparable to compound interest, the longer you've been at it, the better you tend to be. A process that you can optimise and expedite to insane levels, with the amount of amazing information on all topics available through the wonder of the internet. If they've been lifting, and competitive for 5 years more than you, it stands to reason that they'll be better. They've literally had more training sessions, more chicken rice and prayers (brother!)

So, that's all very doom and gloom. How do you overcome a head start? By fully utilising the optimisations and information. Whether that be a coach with the knowledge or doing it off your own research.The next level down, which can be particularly motivating, is looking at their specific lift videos and seeing how you hold up. The caveat to this is that you must be of similar body type, height, levers. If they are stronger than you, and Jesus lean, water cutting just into the 72s, and your walking around at a soft edged 71.5 that would be the first port of call.f you are in a similar boat, then we can get back to the lifts. Let's say they out bench you by 10kgs, what do their accessory lifts look like? If there a significant difference in how much you can dumbbell bench compared to them? If so, that could be an avenue to explore. Especially if it holds true with your own needs analysis.

Missed my 3rd bench about an inch off the chest.

Person in 1st smoked theirs and it was 10kg heavier than mine.

Person in 1st is repping 10kgs more than my best 8 reps for sets of 12 on Dumbbell Bench.

Conclusion, I could probably do with more chest work.

Then you can take that info forward into your training. Maybe planning some chest focussed hypertrophy meso cycles, and then working specifically on chest-1 inch off variants in your strength mesocycles. Feet up spoto press, or 3 position bench for example.Could you correlate this information sans, Insta stalking? Yes. I'm just giving you a rationalisation if you do it anyway! Like most things, how you use the information is the key here.

BAD:'X Person is this much better than me, I may as well not bother, may as well give up, they're probably on drugs.'This way of thinking is useless, I mean that literally. It has no use.

BETTER:Whereas ' X person is this much better than me, why? What do they do differently? Are we comparable? Maybe I should try this, because they do something similar?'​This way of thinking, generates questions and ideas. Which are much more useful. Even if most of them are instantly shut down, exploring even a few avenues could lead to a total lightbulb moment. Let me be clear, this isn't a green light to copy exactly what your favourite lifter on the gram is doing. It's meant as a useful method for generating possible progress routes. You still must be objective in your choice of comparison, and even then, take it with a pinch of salt.​As always leave any negative feedback or dank memes in the comments below. @atsapproved on all social media, creepin on your fitspos all day.

Gaining muscle and strength and an understanding of how to progress further in these areas.

6.What do you like about working with ATS?

It feels very personal and isn’t at all complicated to follow. Always decent advice with a focus on the individuals’ goals and abilities. Nice to have someone who seems to genuinely care about your progress and have a programme fitted to my objectives. Regular check-ins and support to track how you’re progressing and making sure the programme runs smoothly. Everything is clearly structured and explained and further advice is always accessible.

7.Would you recommend ATS to someone? If so, why?

Definitely. I’ve learnt a lot even just from the few weeks I’ve been with ATS and I feel like I’ve already made progress. Adapting the training and programmes to the individuals’ availability, goals and desires makes it a decent resource for anyone wanting some extra support. It’s a great motivation and way to gain a deeper understanding of fitness, lifting and the right method to reach your goals. It’s also not unreasonably expensive, time consuming or complicated to work with.

8.Fun story or anecdote from your time here?

Response to how a training session went in “gif” form is probably one of the greatest ideas ever. Perfect explanation of every emotion experienced.

You have classed yourself as a beginner and new to the sport. What follows will be an in-depth guide to optimal choices you can make now that will set you up the best for long term competitive success. Please note I said optimal, you can make your own choices, however certain things ignored now become bigger hurdles in the long run.

As with the last article, I'm going to start broad and work in. If you are a true beginner or someone who just lifts weights but wants to give the competing a go, the first thing you MUST do is compete. Right now, go sign up for a local meet and come back to this article later… Getting over the anxiety of competition as well as having a date set in place, and gives you something to structure training around (not that you need one, but it helps). There are tonnes of good articles/videos on how to prep for your first meet, here are a couple.1. JTS' Video Guide2. Strong First's write up

One thing that a lot of people overlook is having a handler on the day. Ideally someone with handling experience. If that isn't an option, just bring a friend and get them to find out when you've to be places, and who to give your attempts to. I also like setting goals, especially for first comps. So, here's what I'd recommend to pretty much anyone going into their first comp.

Goals:1.Make 9/9 lift attempts2.Talk to 3 new people.3.Have fun.​For your first competition, making 9/9 is perfectly achievable. I do not encourage going for new personal bests on your first outing, since the added factor of weighing in, lifting to commands, even wearing a singlet, can throw you off your game. You are here for the experience, and having as few stressors as possible should make it a positive one.The second goal might throw a few people off, I tend to make a point of chatting in some form to some new people every comp. It's good to get to know folk in the community, and you never know what you might learn.

The main thing we get from the comp is an official competition total, and you can do a needs analysis for your future training. That being where you look at your performance, and rate what you did well and what you need to improve. The former of those is very important, far too many beginners are super critical of themselves.

Let's assume you achieved all 3 of those goals, what follows is a needs analysis to help guide your training objectives to help you improve. I normally rank the aspects of where people fail in order of importance and ease of improvement.

1.Technical2.Physical3.Mental

Mental may seem out of place, but the other two generally help overcome most mental issues with regards to competition. Let's breakdown what constitutes each of these.

Technical: Any breakdown in lifting technique, determined not be muscular in nature. A failure of obeying the commands/rules of the sports. Or poor execution of form.

Physical: Muscular weakness causing a breakdown in optimal technique. This doesn't need to cause a failed lift to be an issue.

Mental: A failure to rationalise any anxiety associated with a specific lift, or an undue increase in comp day stress from worrying about uncontrollable variables. ​From these, identify what you need to work on. They can then be planning factors in your future training. For example, if you looked at your squat and determined you have a muscular quad weakness, causing a hip shift out of the hole. Then planning some quad focused hypertrophy training cycles would be ideal.

How to plan training:​Normally beginners should be working towards optimal body composition for the most part. One, because beginners don't have substantial amounts of muscle. So, gaining a whole bunch of that is a great step to getting strong. On the other side of the coin, if you're carrying somewhere above 16% bodyfat for males and 26% for females. You should be focusing on dropping that.

Training wise, both of those mean volume. So, going for ideally 3 months and no more of volume training. As a beginner worrying about proximity of competition is irrelevant, you're too weak to merit a peak and should just focus on building a base.

So, volume training with the goal of gaining muscle, or maintaining muscle whilst dieting for fat loss or body recomposition. Some terms to define,

MAV: Minimum adaptive volume. The least amount of working sets per muscle group you can do in a week and get better.

MRV: Maximum recoverable volume. The most amount of working sets per muscle group you can do in a week and manage to recover/survive, and train again the next week.

MV: Maintenance volume. The amount of working sets per muscle group you can do in a week and not get worse.

Working Set: Any set of resistance training that's around or over 60% of your 1 rep max.X/Fail: X being a number. This represents the number of reps you should aim to be from TECHNICAL failure.

Technical Failure: Significant breakdown/compromise in lifting form.

With those terms defined, let's dive into some training planning. First off, how many days a week WILL you train? Not how many you'd like to, or how many you think would be optimal. How many do you know you can and will show up to? That is the real question.

As a beginner, you will make strides pretty much just looking at weights. You are in such a state of untrained, pretty much anything is an effective stimulus.

So, let's just make a safe assumption and say 4 days a week. Could you do it with less? Yes, would more training work better? Yes, to an extent. That isn't our concern right now, 4 days/week is plenty for a beginner.

For ease, let's assume you're training Monday/Tuesday/Thursday/Friday. You could train on another arrangement of days, the only thing to make sure is to minimise back to back days with zero rest in between.

With hypertrophy being our goal, the aim is to stimulate some muscle growth. Typically, you do that with sets of 8-15 reps, slightly dependant on body part trained. How many sets should you do? Let's refer to our terms from earlier. We want to start training around about our MAV. How do you know what that is?! As a beginner, you won't. A good guide is as many work sets in a week to get slightly sore. Again, as a beginner it will not be very much.With that in mind, let's start small and aim for 8 sets per muscle group for the week. How do you decide what to do and on what day? A general rule, is to try and get 60% of your work sets done on a main lift, or close variant. 30% done on a further removed variant, and the last 10% on something another step removed.For example, 8 sets of quads a week may look like

Monday: 5 sets of high bar squats (Main work)

Thursday: 1 sets of lunges (2 steps removed)

Friday: 2 sets of Leg press (1 step removed)

Why split it A-symmetrically? It fits better into planning, and keeping a large amount of your work, close enough to your competition lift (Squat) whilst keeping it varied enough not to cause issues with adaptive resistance later. It also lines up with your ability to recover, giving you a big dose early in the week. Followed by keeping things ticking over, then something reasonable. You don't need to be 100% fresh to do the leg extensions or lunges, but they cause enough disruption to keep things adapting.With that said, what other muscle groups should be in our plan?

You may notice there are a lot of shoulder moves in this. That's because the medial shoulder gets little stimulus from pressing and rowing. So, we added in specific isolation work for it. There is also no reps or weights recommended, we'll get into that now.If you are a beginner, building a solid base of muscle should be priority number 1. To that end, I'm going on as if you will be running as much consecutive volume as possible, namely 12 weeks, in 4-week blocks. With that in mind, and in the interest of variation, I like to use rep focuses of 12/10/8 respectively for the 3 back to back months of training.

So, month 1 the goal on every set of every exercise is 12 reps, month 2 is 10, month 3 is 8.Awesome, how much weight do you use? We will determine that using a proximity to technical failure. Sometime this is annotated as RPE (Rate of perceived exertion) or RIR (reps in reserve). It boils down to how many reps you think you have left, before you can't do anymore. With the caveat that form isn't compromised.

Normally going from 3/Fail up to 1/Fail in the last week before deload. So, block 1 would look like

Week 1: 12 reps@ 3/Fail 10-12 Work setsWeek 2: 12 reps@ 3/Fail 12-14 Work setsWeek 3: 12 reps@ 2/Fail 14-16 Work setsWeek 4: 12 reps@ 1/Fail 18+ Work setsWeek 5 (Deload) 6 reps@ Week 1 weights. 6-8 Work sets​For subsequent blocks, you would just repeat the process. Changing up a few exercises and changing the rep goal to the next one down. You may have spotted already, that the combination of rep goal + X/Fail, will dictate the weight used. Since you must achieve both, 12 reps that aren't 3/Fail for example, won't count and you'll have to up the weight until it meets the proximity to failure. Similarly, as you go into the next block the lower rep goal will cause weights used to be heavier by default, since you can lift more weight for 10 than you can for 12.

Diet:

With training covered, let's get into the other side of the coin, diet. As a beginner, it's the ideal time to work towards optimal body composition. You aren't good enough for it to affect your competition calendar or cause any serious competitive anxiety from any minor performance loss. That may sound harsh, but honestly if you can get this done now it will pay off ENORMOUSLY later.

Time for some more hurt feels. If you are over 15% bodyfat for guys, 25% for ladies, it's time to get cutting. Volume is the optimal time to get it done, the training is the most intensive on kcals, and it's far out of any competitive preparation where altering body comp could affect skill acquisition. Measure this number with calipers, do the largest number of sites you can find a calculator for, and do each site 3 times and take an average. Scales that you stand on are not accurate for measuring bf%. Obviously if you have a bod pod or DEXA scan available to you, use that.

General guidelines:Cutting- Aim to lose ~0.5kg of bodyweight a week. This number will vary depending on your weight. If your start weight is lower [sub 55kg for example], this number will come down. If it is higher [100kg+] it will go up.

Gaining- Similarly, but upward trending. Mainly track your kcals and protein intake, since you'll be pounding the other 2 just to make up the kcals.

To hammer the point home, it is much easier to adjust body composition early on. You're fresh to training, so stimulating adaptation will be super easy (nooby gains). It's much less likely you'll get fatter when gaining muscle if you start leaner. The entire end goal of powerlifting physiology is to have as much muscle on your bones whilst still in/slightly above your weight class as possible, so starting that way is a good idea. It sucks WAY more to have to take extended periods out of competition or realise that your main avenue for more progress is body recomposition when you're already established as a competitor. It's well worth doing early, that way any course correcting that needs to occur later will be minor at best.

Diet wise, whether you're going up or down. Track multiple variables, and factor in error margins. Keep track of visual landmarks, how many abs can you see? How vascular are you? Rather than doing a full bf test every month, just keep track of 1 or 2 sites you can easily measure yourself. Weight is the main one, track weight ideally 3 times a week. Measure it in the morning after WC use. If you are not moving in the direction you want, add/subtract another ~200kcal from the equation. Give it a week, see how the measurements come out. Similarly, to training you can't blast the same thing for months on end. 3 months is pretty much the upper limit I would recommend for either gaining or cutting. Followed by a maintenance phase at whatever new weight you are at. 3 months isn't mandatory, the ideal time is to stop juuuuust before you start going a bit stir crazy. You want to test out the limits of your willpower, not break it. It will break, everyone's does eventually. Funnily enough, the more practice and experience you have with it, the better yours will last.​Hopefully this has given you at the very least some direction of what to aim for and start looking to do with your training for powerlifting. We'll now delve into some FAQs, as always please leave all inflammatory remarks in the comments or @atsapproved on social media.

FAQ.

-Why so much volume? Because, the level of homeostatic disruption (severity of training stress) is proportional to the adaption. So, the bigger the stress the bigger the gains. Obviously applied strategically, why would you not?

-Why deload so often?On the back of the last answer, because it balances out the fact you'll be searching for your upper threshold of recoverable training. At some point you will find and exceed it, meaning that you won't be able to progressively train in the following week. So, it's convenient that the following week will be a deload anyway. Where you don't need to worry about progressive training performance.

-Something about fat shamingLook, you're reading this because you want to get better at powerlifting. In a "sport" with almost 0 athletic application, there's really no reason not to be in shape if being competitive is your goal. Even in the super heavy classes for both genders, the goal is the same. As much muscle, as strong as possible.

Without weight class restrictions, you can get as fat as you like. But don't kid yourself, you don't 'need' to be that fat. Fat doesn't contract, it doesn't help you shift more Kgs. Do as you please, but don't be annoyed at objective assessments of sport performance.

-When do I do 5x5? Generic programmes will work, for a fair amount of people. But the application is limited. The general idea behind dedicated volume training for powerlifting is1.Having more muscle is a straightforward way to be stronger.

2.You can't train the competition lifts with zero variance, in the same rep ranges, all the time. (So, using more varied movements in your hypertrophy block, kills both those birds with one stone.)

3.The higher stress of the training lends itself better to body comp changing goals, which funnily enough should be done as far out of competition as possible. Similarly, to hypertrophy training, being the least specific to your competition, should be done as far out as plannable.